Lauren Dostal: I Am Walking into the Water and It Is Cold

It covers the tips of my toes and my feet run ragged from all the miles I've walked without a compass in hand.

It runs up the torn muscles of my calves, halting me mid-flight with my arm still reaching for my go-to whiskey solution.

I am walking into the water and it is cold.

It touches my ragged knees too worn from kneeling before the idol of my own self-image, my bathroom sink lined with hundreds of products designed to enhance my natural beauty but still I feel ugly and used and I don’t have to wonder why they call it concealer—this mask in which I live every day.

It rises over my thighs with their scars from stretch marks and knife marks and the unhealable wounds of childbirth tattooed on my body to remind me of my status as empty vessel.

I am walking into the water and it is cold.

Up to my navel, my stomach growling and hungry, my appetite never quenched no matter how much I shovel down my throat; over my abs which clench as I sob and wretch up the pre-masticated emptiness so I can try to fill myself again. Again. Again. Again.

I am walking into the water and it is cold.

Over my fingertips rubbed raw from trying to claw my way into your holy house, bare knuckles bleeding and all my phalanges broken from swinging my fists against the unbreakable concrete jaws of demons who just keep coming, my hands as limp and helpless as overcooked pasta melting into the waves which surround them.

I am walking into the water and it is cold.

It covers my breasts and we need no imagination to guess how these have been ruined. Imagination is what got us here in the first place: you imagining that I am exposed, me begging for you to stop, you laughing your advances off as a joke or a compliment or worse, as love, making me feel dirty for wanting, for not wanting, for the violation which people like to tell me I asked for. Your eyes, my sins, the myriad ways I feel shrunk to the size of my small breasts meant for milk but now deflated and degraded.

I am walking into the water and it is cold.

Over this back broken from the weight of pleasing people with my charm and wit, the weight of maintaining a lovable personality with a bright smile and wise eyes to match.

Licking my shoulders bent under their staggering load of loss—the death of my father, my brother-in-law, all of my grandparents and two of my uncles, my best friend’s father and then her mother, my unborn child still light in my womb, and myself every day as I look in the mirror and think of how dim grows the sky with each missing star.

I am killing myself, but not in the way that I tried before, in a way that will permanently alter my corpse of a body, revitalizing my limbs--a death that brings life.

This old body is nothing more than the empty husk of a seed and my soul is the dormant DNA set to life by a spark of something I cannot explain nor do I try but suddenly my skin cracks open and out of the rust of my broken up shell comes a green shoot bursting forth.

I am lifting up my face and it is warm. The sun is warm on my face, my jaw unclenched, eyes closing, opening, at rest… I squish my toes into the sand, my body washed and shivering from past waters, and I am standing still, here, on the shore of this new land.

I am standing—

still here!

On the shore of your land.

Lauren Dostal is a native Floridian writing out of Tampa. She has work in Entropy, Hobart, Moonchild Mag, and Philosophical Idiot. Follow her on Twitter at @ell_emm_dee.